Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Log Shipping

Another, more direct, method of creating a completely redundant database image is to utilize log shipping. Microsoft “certifies” log shipping as a method of creating an “almost hot” spare. Some folks even use log shipping as an alternative to data replication (it has been referred to as “the poor man’s data replication”). Microsoft has announced that log shipping will stay in SQL Server and that they will instead be deprecating database mirroring (even though they had, at one time, announced that log shipping would be deprecated). So, if you still want to use log shipping, it is perfectly viable—for now.

Log shipping does three primary things:

Makes an exact image copy of a database on one server from a database dump

Creates a ...